A Start8 menu for Windows, IT security, and even improved gaming show up this year.

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It's that time of year: a new Windows release is coming, with Mac virtualization application updates in tow. You'd think there's only so much you could do with a program that hosts another OS, but these new updates are surprising for their innovation. With the previous release of VMware Fusion 5 Professional, VMware started differentiating its products from Parallels by tapping its established, IT-oriented features. On the other hand, Parallels is pushing closer Mac integration and better 3D graphics support. The latest releases seem to be in much the same vein, but that's enough talking around these releases—let's dive in.

Test Hardware

17-inch MacBook Pro 2.5GHz Sandy Bridge

16GB RAM

1GB Radeon 6770M

OS X 10.9 Mavericks builds 13A584 through golden master

13-inch mid-2011 MacBook Air 1.7GHz Core i5

4GB RAM

Intel HD 3000 384MB graphics

OS X 10.8.4

Since both VMware and Parallels are advertising support for Mavericks-ready features, I decided to run the MacBook Pro on Mavericks. (Luckily, the OS has been very stable and, toward the end of the review, became a release candidate). Any bugs in the earlier versions used would have been minor enough to not affect usability as client OSes or as a host for Parallels or VMware's software. And because Parallels Desktop 9 features Power Nap support, I needed to steal my girlfriend's MacBook Air to test it out.

Dave Girard on Parallels, Fusion

We'll start with the individual features and then compare the two where the new features overlap (for example, Windows 8.1, Linux, and Mac OS X 10.9 client OS support). As usual, I won't be reviewing these programs from scratch, so readers who aren't sure how they currently stand should read our previous comparative reviews.

New Parallels Desktop 9 features

Parallels has always been good at bridging OS X and Windows with support for the newer features of the Mac OS. Version 9 is no different.

Mountain Lion (and later) dictionary support

Parallels Desktop 9 adds the OS X contextual dictionary support. As one of the more frequently used OS X writing tools, the contextual dictionary and thesaurus availability on Windows client VMs is definitely a welcome addition. If you are writing and want an alternate word for something you've written, just hit Command-Control-D, and you'll get a definition of your selected words as well as some synonyms.

It's a great tool. While it may not seem like a big addition, for those who use Dragon Dictate in Windows or Office in a VM, it's going to be invaluable. It's not always flawless, however.

The definition is appearing below the VM window.

But I only saw that once in a while. Otherwise, it's a shame this feature isn't available to other client OSes (although I don't think a lot of people are using Linux for Open Office).

Power Nap features

If you have a recent-ish portable Mac that supports Power Nap—the technology that lets your sleeping machine do tasks with one eye open while consuming minimal power—then Parallels Desktop 9 can take advantage of this by enabling updates to Windows VMs while asleep. To test it, I started a large Windows update and closed the lid of my Power Nap-capable MacBook Air and checked in occasionally to see its progress. Predictably, it moved much slower through the update tasks. Still, when I came back in the morning, the VM was up to date and had rebooted with the installed updates. Obviously, you don't get this type of thing for free in terms of power, so if you're worried about battery life, double-check in the system preferences that Power Nap is off on battery power—that is the default setting. Otherwise, this is a perfect example of something you'd like to do while sleeping a machine overnight, and Parallels definitely gets points for thinking ahead here. It's a shame it's not supported for OSes other than Windows, though.

Official DirectX 10 support

Parallels added experimental support for DirectX 10 in version 8 of Desktop, but as the “e" word implies, it wasn't stable and ready for prime time. Version 9 adds full support to DirectX 10, and seeing a new game like Bioshock Infinite run in a VM on high settings is pretty amazing for its technical accomplishments:

It's a slideshow at times, but it's still impressive for virtualization. Yes, there is a Mac version of this game, but I chose this program because of that limitation and because it comes with a benchmark utility.

In a similar vein to Fusion 5's addition of OpenGL support for Linux VMs, obtaining a top speed isn't as important as adding support since many apps simply refuse to run without it.

VMware and VirtualBox fail to launch Bioshock Infinite and other DirectX 10 apps.

There are the rare professional 3D applications that default to DirectX in Windows—Autodesk's Max being the most high-profile example. It's likely that some of these will move their minimum requirements from DirectX 9.0c to DirectX 10 in the next few years to get more sophisticated real-time previews. Parallels has laid the difficult but much-needed groundwork to see it make it through this transition. I think that DirectX 11, which supports tessellation, will take a lot more work to implement in a virtualized GPU, but the user need for that is years away, thankfully. It's more pressing to support OpenGL 3 and above since 99.9 percent of professional 3D applications use OpenGL. Version 2.1—the maximum version supported by VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop—is getting old enough that we could see 3D applications for Windows and Linux require version 3 in the near future. High-end animation program Houdini already defaults to OpenGL 3 on Windows and Linux, and it will crash if you don't have a GL 3-capable card. CAD and CAM software display needs are basic enough that I don't think they will be foisting an OpenGL 3 requirement on their users for a much longer time to come.

DirectX 10 benchmark in Boot Camp and in a VM

It's not really playable at that framerate, but my 2011 MacBook Pro's aging 6770M doesn't do wonders in Boot Camp either. It was showing the exact same screen rendering as the AMD Catalyst drivers in Boot Camp from what I could tell, and that's impressive considering the shader complexity in Bioshock Infinite. If you're looking to play a Humble Indie Bundle-type game that's DirectX 10 only, Parallels Desktop 9 should work fine on recent hardware. I'm really curious to see how this will perform on the 2013 Mac Pro's FirePro GPU, which is basically a Radeon 7970 with oodles of ECC memory. Since there are two of them, I wonder if they will be able to implement CrossFire to use both GPUs in a virtual machine. Dare to nerdy dream.

Thunderbolt and Firewire drive mounting for VMs

When you connect a FireWire or Thunderbolt drive in Parallels Desktop 9, you get a prompt much like the USB device one that lets you mount them to the VM (while it still connects the Mac OS side the same way):

Unfortunately, neither the name of my Thunderbolt drive nor any indication it's on the Thunderbolt port are shown. Instead, you get a serial number and generic device ID.

Once it mounts inside the VM, the name shows up correctly next to its drive letter in Windows, and you don't need to have an HFS+ driver, like MacDrive, installed to get read and write support. If you are daisy chaining devices on Thunderbolt, those work fine, and my 27-inch Dell screen still worked the same way passing through my Parallels-mounted Lacie 2big. At first, since you can already share drives to the VM, I was a little confused as to why this disk sharing scheme would be useful. Then I remembered those times that I needed to mount USB disks in the VM as disks to make boot disks, and it all made sense.

Cloud sync

I frequently test my Maya scripts for compatibility in Linux and Windows. They are already in my Dropbox folder, so it's a big boon to not have to set up redundant Dropbox installs for my VMs. Parallels automatically detects what cloud apps you have installed and sets up that environment for your client VMs. For Dropbox, SkyDrive, and Google Drive, I know I could just share that folder separately, but having the Dropbox folder readily available is a nice touch. The iCloud integration is the most interesting since it exposes the innards of iCloud as a filesystem, sort of FUSE style:

Enlarge/ iCloud and the data stored by its applications clearly sorted into subfolders.

I tested iCloud saving and syncing with a basic RTF text file, and files saved from Wordpad in Windows 7 Pro worked fine when opened back up in OS X. It was a flawless experience overall. Still, I don't know if read/write access to your cloud data should be on by default since it raises potential data security issues you might not be aware of as a basic user. My only real complaint about the cloud integration features is that they are only available to Windows VMs. This seems to be a mantra that's growing increasingly loud at Parallels.

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83 Reader Comments

Since a lot of your professional work seems to be done in Windows, might it not be better to have a separate dedicated Windows workstation and use something like a KVM switch or even just RDP into the workstation?

That won't be appropriate for casual users of Windows of course but since the review focused on so many professional graphics applications I am suggesting the above.

I'm always checking the free trials for Parallels out when new versions release, but I always hit the same issue: poor support for the latest software.

I have kept bootcamp and RDP/VNC as my Windows solution because it just plain works. Although I would love the integrated windows that parallels offers, it is tough to beat something that is free and working (plus performance boosts from running native).

Guess I'll check in a few months (again) to see if the Windows 8 integration is any better for VMs.

Taantric - All of my work is done in OS X actually. I just use Windows to convert some models from Max format for maya which I use in OS X. and I test my Maya scripts for Windows and Linux users. Otherwise, I have a 3930k for gaming and helping with network renders.

There are the rare professional 3D applications that default to DirectX in Windows—Autodesk's Max being the most high-profile example. It's likely that some of these will move their minimum requirements from DirectX 9.0c to DirectX 10 in the next few years to get more sophisticated real-time previews. Parallels has laid the difficult but much-needed groundwork to see it make it through this transition. I think that DirectX 11, which supports tessellation, will take a lot more work to implement in a virtualized GPU, but the user need for that is years away, thankfully.

I'm glad to see VMs are frustration-compatible with common IT practices. Users should soon be able to hate ALL computers equally, as they should.

But seriously, it looks like the changes from Parallels Desktop 8 to 9 aren't all that huge. I'll stick to my "every other version" plan, or perhaps switch to VMWare if I need better Linux support. Right now I only need Win8 and Ubuntu in a VM, and mainly for non-gaming development. Visual Studio is basically the only thing installed on my Windows VM, while the Linux VM is more of a convenience thing for server software development.

Why are the encryption benchmarks limited to suspend and restore times? Although it's certainly good to know, personally I rarely suspend my VMs. What I really want to know is if it affects boot/shutdown time and general performance once booted. Any ideas?

For example, the default disk size of 8GB is too small to install most modern OSes

Are you trying to spread FUD? I just went through the assistant picking Windows 8.1 64bit as the guest OS, and VirtualBox picked 25GB by default and explicitly recommended not using anything smaller.

I have been using it for years and have never found any bugs. Maybe with a beta version of windows, but I have used it almost daily with XP/Vista/7/8 for many years now and I can't remember ever finding any bugs off the top of my head.

Since a lot of your professional work seems to be done in Windows, might it not be better to have a separate dedicated Windows workstation and use something like a KVM switch or even just RDP into the workstation?

That won't be appropriate for casual users of Windows of course but since the review focused on so many professional graphics applications I am suggesting the above.

I thought the same thing. A review of a product used to run professional Windows programs on a Mac....The alternative seems obvious enough. You never hear of a Windows user using products like this in order to use a "must have" app on OS X.

For me, being able to keep everything on one laptop is very convenient. I have Windows set up on my Mac using a Boot Camp partition (which both Parallels and VMWare are able to mount and run as VMs) so I can run my necessary software in a VM and I can dual-boot if necessary. Autodesk Inventor in my case, which works pretty well under Parallels.

Linux support in Parallels (8 and 9) is definitely hit or miss, but can be used if you aren't picky about what distribution you use. When it hits, it's great. When it misses, it SEVERELY misses. For example, Elementary OS runs quite well, as does KDE OpenSUSE, Crunchbang, and XFCE Fedora 19 (I mainly use XFCE Fedora 19. It feels like it is running bare metal. Very smooth and fast). Gnome 3 Fedora 19 kinda sorta runs but is very pokey and is quite unusable at times. I could not get Gnome 3 OpenSUSE running at all, it kept locking up while loading the install menu. Ubuntu works great, in fact a direct download/install link is right there in the Parallels menu. I don't like Unity so I don't use Ubuntu but for others that could be quite handy.

"iCloud support" only just needs to read the contents of ~/Library/Mobile Documents/. It doesn't require any specific app support if an application is not sandboxed. Save to a folder there, the OS will automatically upload and populate the file across iCloud devices.

A review of a product used to run professional Windows programs on a Mac....The alternative seems obvious enough. You never hear of a Windows user using products like this in order to use a "must have" app on OS X.

Actually, as someone who uses many of those "must have" apps I see quite a few people jumping through hoops to get OS X running in a virtual machine on windows (you can do it, but hardware drivers are difficult if you want, say, internet access to work).

For example, if you build websites and don't want to buy an iOS device, then the only way to test your website in Mobile Safari is to install Xcode (which is free) on a mac. There are a lot of touch screen specific behavioural issues that web developers need to be aware of, and you can't test them any other way.

Also, as someone who writes mac software... there is a steady stream of requests to port our stuff to windows. It's not going to happen though, unless GNUStep gets a lot better than it currently is.

There can't be any irony in the fact that open-source Virtualbox runs open-source operating systems better than closed-source ones, and closed-source VMWare and Parallels run closed-source operating systems better...

Since a lot of your professional work seems to be done in Windows, might it not be better to have a separate dedicated Windows workstation and use something like a KVM switch or even just RDP into the workstation?

That won't be appropriate for casual users of Windows of course but since the review focused on so many professional graphics applications I am suggesting the above.

Agreed: great article. Nice to read more from Dave beyond the creative content industry.

KVMs are a hassle and switching is annoyingly slow. You have separate environments and duplicative hardware (and software in some cases), and excess power consumption. Use only as a last resort.

I use Parallels and am amazed how well it works overall, given the not too distant past when Connectix/MS Virtual PC was the only viable option. Ugggh.

Are there any issues with running Parallels, Fusion and VirtualBox concurrently on the same "mac?" With the advent of 12-core Xeons, a new 12-core MacPro, and potentially 24-core hackintoshes, this could make sense in some situations.

KVMs are a hassle and switching is annoyingly slow. You have separate environments and duplicative hardware (and software in some cases), and excess power consumption. Use only as a last resort.

Say what? I don't know that I've ever used one that was slow, some that were buggy sure. I use them every day at work and have had several in my home since the 90's. Currently I'm using a NEC monitor with a built in 2 port KVM that works OK (less clutter).

KVMs are a hassle and switching is annoyingly slow. You have separate environments and duplicative hardware (and software in some cases), and excess power consumption. Use only as a last resort.

Say what? I don't know that I've ever used one that was slow, some that were buggy sure. I use them every day at work and have had several in my home since the 90's. Currently I'm using a NEC monitor with a built in 2 port KVM that works OK (less clutter).

Aside from the other issues I mentioned, there is 3-5 second latency switching between inputs. If you have a multi-monitor setup, it can get complicated and expensive. Switching back and forth is tedious and tiresome, especially if done repetitively over the course of a day.

I use Parallels on a MacBook Pro for individual 'must have' Windows programs. I had a dream of creating a Windows 7 virtual machine that I could use as a standard development environment on both Windows and Mac.

It seemed logical that the virtual machine image could be shared/synced between Windows and Mac, to provide a consistent environment regardless of which computer I was using.

However, Parallels does not provide a Windows client, which seems incredibly short-sighted. So there is no way to open a Parallels Virtual Machine on any system other than Mac OSX.

VirtualBox, however, *does* support this, and has now become my default VM manager.

Ya I've had a few KVMs and use one now. They aren't slow but Windows can be slow at setting up the device once I switch back. This doesn't happen on the Mac side but it's likely the KVM I'm using that is at fault. they can be annoying and drop input occasionally or have other bugs.

As for mixing virtualization software on one machine, you can install them on the same machine but I wouldn't run them at the same time. That's asking for trouble. You can run multiple VMs simultaneously within Parallels or VMWare so you could tap more cores that way. But it's also not that recommended from the warning the software gives you

I would have loved to see some power (battery) and temperature data in the article, as I believe there has been quite a big difference in these areas between Parallels and VMware Fusion in the past, with Parallels coming out ahead, I believe. Significant heat and decreased battery expectations would impact my purchasing decision.

I would have loved to see some power (battery) and temperature data in the article, as I believe there has been quite a big difference in these areas between Parallels and VMware Fusion in the past, with Parallels coming out ahead, I believe. Significant heat and decreased battery expectations would impact my purchasing decision.

Indeed. I just switched from Fusion to Parallels a few months ago (right before the new version) because Fusion required the discrete video card on my MacBook Pro, sucking down the battery in about 2 hours when unplugged. VMWare tech support couldn't give me a timetable on when they'd be supporting integrated, lower-power video, so I switched to Parallels, which has supported this for a while. They're both great solutions in my experience, but markedly longer battery life was the must-have feature that got me to switch to Parallels.

Would somebody who understands such things be kind enough to either a) succinctly explain or b) provide a link about the relationship between the VMs created by individual users with these small-scaled tools and the "cloud computing" industrial/commercial VMs deployed in more robust enterprise environments?

For example, the default disk size of 8GB is too small to install most modern OSes

Are you trying to spread FUD? I just went through the assistant picking Windows 8.1 64bit as the guest OS, and VirtualBox picked 25GB by default and explicitly recommended not using anything smaller.

I have been using it for years and have never found any bugs. Maybe with a beta version of windows, but I have used it almost daily with XP/Vista/7/8 for many years now and I can't remember ever finding any bugs off the top of my head.

For example, the default disk size of 8GB is too small to install most modern OSes

Are you trying to spread FUD? I just went through the assistant picking Windows 8.1 64bit as the guest OS, and VirtualBox picked 25GB by default and explicitly recommended not using anything smaller.

I have been using it for years and have never found any bugs. Maybe with a beta version of windows, but I have used it almost daily with XP/Vista/7/8 for many years now and I can't remember ever finding any bugs off the top of my head.

Is there an article or explanation somewhere as to why WINE or Cider isn't a viable alternative to these? I know that Cider and Cedega are mainly a fork of WINE and mostly used for games, but couldn't this also be used for Windows apps too?

For software developers integration with Vagrant is becoming increasingly important. By default, Vagrant uses VirtualBox, but it can use other providers and VMware Fusion recently got official support. I know there is a community plugin to provide Parallels support but I don't know how they compare.

Thanks for the next instalment in the Parralels vs Fusion review series

As a multi-platform software developer, a good capable VM host is one of our most important tools after the various IDEs

One issue that is affecting a lot of OSX based developers (read iOS) is SLAT support in VMs. This is because if you want to develope Windows Phone 8 software (say to port your iPhone app to WP8), you need to use the WP8 SDK inside Windows 8, and the WP8 SDK makes use of MS' HyperV technology to run the WP8 emulator. Or use Bootcamp, which is a very heavy mode switch

SLAT is used for VM in a VM support, and I know that Fusion and Parallels now have rudimentary SLAT support.

Last I checked Parallels were recommending only using one cpu core in the VM when using the "Nested VM" support.

In my tests, I found the DirectX support went to haywire when using Nested VM, and I couldn't get the network functionality to work in the nested VM (the WP8 emulator).

As part of a serious OSX VM review, I think reviewing the Nested VM support of both VMs would be a very useful addendum, and specifically, how it related to WP8 development, which I think is the major reason why OSX based developers would need Nested VM support

Great review, and I hope you'll consider looking into each VM's Nested VM support in future

KVMs are a hassle and switching is annoyingly slow. You have separate environments and duplicative hardware (and software in some cases), and excess power consumption. Use only as a last resort.

Say what? I don't know that I've ever used one that was slow, some that were buggy sure. I use them every day at work and have had several in my home since the 90's. Currently I'm using a NEC monitor with a built in 2 port KVM that works OK (less clutter).

Aside from the other issues I mentioned, there is 3-5 second latency switching between inputs. If you have a multi-monitor setup, it can get complicated and expensive. Switching back and forth is tedious and tiresome, especially if done repetitively over the course of a day.

I'm not sure if too many of them support shared folders, drag and drop, or clipboard sharing either

I tend to use VirtualBox for my Solaris and Linux VMs and Parallels just for Windows. Personally I don't find any problems with this setup and Coherence is just great. The smooth integration got me to buy it rather than just use VirtualBox. I would have trialled VMware Fusion, but I never really liked it on Windows and I can't for the life of me find a link to their academic pricing. It seems like they might have stopped this?

Seems a bit late to be adding Firewire support, but these updates do show continuing improvement. I do wonder at the slow speed of improving OpenGL support though; I would have thought there'd be a way to just map calls from a virtual machine onto the host machine's OpenGL version. Sure it's not quite as simple as that, but I would have thought it'd be a lot easier to do than DirectX support, though even that could potentially be handled by DirectX to OpenGL drivers for short-term compatibility, with more specific support where it's needed?

I dunno, I guess I just don't see why graphics performance can still lag quite a bit, as I still generally get better performance from games I can run under WINE rather than virtualisation, though WINE has plenty of weird compatibility issues I'd like to avoid.

Since a lot of your professional work seems to be done in Windows, might it not be better to have a separate dedicated Windows workstation and use something like a KVM switch or even just RDP into the workstation?

That won't be appropriate for casual users of Windows of course but since the review focused on so many professional graphics applications I am suggesting the above.

I thought the same thing. A review of a product used to run professional Windows programs on a Mac....The alternative seems obvious enough. You never hear of a Windows user using products like this in order to use a "must have" app on OS X.

This is because of OSX licensing. You can only run OSX VMs on Apple hardware. I would be virtualizing OSX right now on my Windows workstartion(using VMWare WOrkstation) if I could do it on the up and up.

Since a lot of your professional work seems to be done in Windows, might it not be better to have a separate dedicated Windows workstation and use something like a KVM switch or even just RDP into the workstation?

That won't be appropriate for casual users of Windows of course but since the review focused on so many professional graphics applications I am suggesting the above.

I thought the same thing. A review of a product used to run professional Windows programs on a Mac....The alternative seems obvious enough. You never hear of a Windows user using products like this in order to use a "must have" app on OS X.

This is because of OSX licensing. You can only run OSX VMs on Apple hardware. I would be virtualizing OSX right now on my Windows workstartion(using VMWare WOrkstation) if I could do it on the up and up.

They won't even let you run Mac OS X on Mac OS X.

There was a version of VMWare Fusion a couple of years ago that was accidentally configured to allow various versions of OS X to be installed on Mac-hosted virtual machines. Apple got after them and they immediately changed it—and triggered ungrade links everywhere—but a lot of users just held onto that copy so that they could (for example) install Lion and Mountain Lion onto machines running Snow Leopard and vice versa.